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Welcome to my blog. I am honored to have you visit. I hope you'll find my articles a blessing. I welcome your input and especially comments and questions.

I write as a Christian from Jerusalem, Israel about Biblical subjects.

I am particularly interested in the subjects of children, families, women's issues, corporal punishment, science and nature as these subjects relate to the Holy Scriptures.

For more information, see my website: www.biblechild.com

With every good wish - Samuel Martin

Thursday, October 06, 2011

Why I think the Pearl book should be removed from Amazon and any other internet bookstore or other distribution channel

Why I think the Pearl book should be removed from Amazon and any other internet bookstore or other distribution channel

What if the life of one innocent child, like Lydia Schatz who was seven years old when she died, were to be saved because that book is not on Amazon? Should the book be removed to save one life? I say "yes" resoundingly! I say you have to protect children whose parents could potentially get a hold of that book and take its teachings too far. We are now talking about matters of life and death here. Lydia Schatz and other children have had their life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the ability to love, stolen from them permanently. This is the ultimate human rights violation: the violation of the right to live! In my view, the book "To Train Up A Child" should be illegal and should not be sold in any way, shape or form, but today in many countries the political systems are influenced by people who continue to support the corporal punishment of children. That is their right and that is what the majority still wants. I personally think that in the absence of a law banning the information, people who care have to do what they can and try to take steps in the interim to protect the lives of the innocent people (in this case children) from those people who take things to extremes. One way to do that is to try to influence and stop distribution channels which make promulgation of the information easy to obtain. Also, these authors hide behind the law and say their arguments are covered by freedom of religion. So, we have to do what we can to try to stop them because they are currently protected by the law. Being a law abiding citizen, I believe one must work within the legal framework they have to try to right wrongs that exist.

People for centuries have been dealing with this issue of corporal punishment and religious scholars have always sided on the imperative to protect human life, especially innocent human life that cannot protect itself. Occasionally this means protecting innocent human life even from the people who brought that life into the world (or who are responsible for protecting that life like the adoptive parents of Lydia Schatz, whose actions contributed to her death and who plead guilty to the charges against them and are currently paying their debt to society for the wrongs they have done.)

Some 1,700 years ago, Rabbinical scholars grappled with a case which forced them to act to protect all children. I refer to this case on page 39 of my book “Thy Rod and Thy Staff, They Comfort Me: Christians and the Spanking Controversy” saying: “In this regard, children should never be threatened with punishment at a later time because of a key legal case in which a parent threatened his child with a beating at a later time and the child went and committed suicide. This event in Jewish legal history has profoundly affected all interpretations surrounding corporal punishment of children since the time when this event took place over 1700 years ago.)” The effect was that because of this individual case, the Rabbis ruled that to avoid this ever happening again, parents could not threaten their children with a beating to be administered at a later time.

Today, in the absence of laws like the above referenced one which are designed to protect all children, even from their parents, in this environment, one has to work to do what they can to protect innocent children. That is why I say, ask the distribution channels for this material to cut it off.

I take this issue very personally as you can tell and look on it in a very familial way. Why? In Acts 17:28, St. Paul speaking to the men of Athens said: “'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.' So, if we are ‘His offspring,’ which I believe is true, then we are all God’s children, but the Bible speaks of the third and fourth generations.

Generally speaking in life, we are normally aware of either three or perhaps four generations in our lives. Most of us knew our grand parents (the third generation) and occasionally great grandparents (fourth generation). Each person finds themselves in the generational level that they are in.

I am in the generation of being a parent (second generation) to two children (first generation). Since all men are brothers, as Paul said, the children of one Father, God, then other parents are, according to Scripture, my brothers and sisters. And logically this would mean that I am the ‘uncle’ of their children according to the way God looks at it.

As the ‘uncle’ of Lydia Schatz, Hana Williams, Sean Paddock and every other child on this earth, I will do what I believe is needed (and what I believe the Lord would have any one who cares about their family members to do) to protect those children when my misguided brothers and sisters (their parents) and the legal systems (in numerous countries) have failed them. Where parent and legal system fail, we need to do what we can to protect life and that is why I favor seeing that book removed from Amazon and any other forum where it can be bought and could potentially influence someone to do what was done to my nieces and nephews, Lydia, Sean and now Hana. This is now a matter of saving life.

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About Me

Samuel Martin was born in England and is the youngest child of Dr. Ernest L. and Helen R. Martin, who are both Americans. He lived in the UK for the first 7 years of his life before moving to the USA with his family at age 7. He lived in the USA until 2001 when he married a native Israeli and relocated to live in Jerusalem. He and his wife, Sonia, have 2 daughters.
His experience with biblical scholarship began at an early age. His father initiated a program in conjunction with Hebrew Univ. and Prof. Benjamin Mazar, where over a 5 year period, some 450 college students came to work on an archaeological excavation in Jerusalem starting in 1969. Since that first trip, Samuel has visited Israel on 14 different occasions living more than 5 years of his life in the country. He has toured all areas of Israel as well as worked in several archaeological excavations.
Today, he has begun his academic career publishing 2 books dealing with biblical issues.
I write regularly on biblical subjects with a particular interest in children, families, nature, science and the Bible,and gender in the Biblical context.